As America goes gaga over over a young centrist politician called Barack Obama, David Aaronovitch sums up something very well this morning, which has become increasingly apparently as this 2008 presidential race has developed: namely that misogyny appears to be even stronger than racism.
I’m a fan of Hilary Clinton and would like to see her elected to the White House this November. She is to the left of Barack Obama whose main qualities seem to be his youth and inexperience and the endless use of the word “change”, which is employed in vague and amorphous sentences that also employ the word “hope”. A lot.
This has sent liberal writers in the US into some nonsensical melt down of a love in. Aaronovitch picks up on “the usually super-sour Maureen Dowd in The New York Times”, who says he offers Americans “a cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent West Wing sort of president”.
A West Wing presidency? You see where the liberal fantasy comes in. I loved that show as much as the next liberal lefty. Jed Bartlet was the best president ever, but sadly that was a TV show.
Aaronovitch goes on before he hits on this very valid point in how some have turned on Hilary Clinton and the way they have done it:
“When it comes to choosing people to rule over us, I have long suspected misogyny was even stronger than racism. Iowa has never elected a woman in a congressional or gubernatorial election. So sure, you can have the safe, smily, “witty”, mixed-race guy, but let’s not go for the scary woman. Who wants to be pussy-whipped by a Glenn Close or Meryl Streep career bitch every time there’s a State of the Union address? Shouldn’t they really (oh, whisper it) be at home with the kids?”
